The cocktail-party problem revisited: early processing and selection of multi-talker speech

Abstract

How do we recognize what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time? This review summarizes widespread research in psychoacoustics, auditory scene analysis, and attention, all dealing with early processing and selection of speech, which has been stimulated by this question. Important effects occurring at the peripheral and brainstem levels are mutual masking of sounds and “unmasking” resulting from binaural listening. Psychoacoustic models have been developed that can predict these effects accurately, albeit using computational approaches rather than approximations of neural processing. Grouping—the segregation and streaming of sounds—represents a subsequent processing stage that interacts closely with attention. Sounds can be easily grouped—and subsequently selected—using primitive features such as spatial location and fundamental frequency. More complex processing is required when lexical, syntactic, or semantic information is used. Whereas it is now clear that such processing can take place preattentively, there also is evidence that the processing depth depends on the task-relevancy of the sound. This is consistent with the presence of a feedback loop in attentional control, triggering enhancement of to-be-selected input. Despite recent progress, there are still many unresolved issues: there is a need for integrative models that are neurophysiologically plausible, for research into grouping based on other than spatial or voice-related cues, for studies explicitly addressing endogenous and exogenous attention, for an explanation of the remarkable sluggishness of attention focused on dynamically changing sounds, and for research elucidating the distinction between binaural speech perception and sound localization.

Intentional switching of auditory attention between long and short sequential tone patterns

“…This cue then indicates which task participants should perform in the upcoming trial. This kind of explicit cueing-procedure has been used in several studies to investigate auditory selective attention in a dichotic listening paradigm , 2015Koch, Lawo, Fels, & Vorländer, 2011;, 2015Lawo, Fels, Oberem, & Koch, 2014). In the dichotic listening paradigm, two different auditory stimuli or auditory streams are presented simultaneously, one to each ear.…”

“…Typically, participants only attend to one ear. Auditory selective attention allows the listener to focus on the relevant auditory stimulus, while distracting stimuli remain in the perceptual background (for reviews, see Bronkhorst, 2015;Lachter, Forster, & Ruthruff, 2004;Schneider, Li, & Daneman, 2007;Shinn-Cunningham, 2008). Early studies on auditory selective attention in a setting with competing stimulus streams have focused on sustained auditory attention and involuntary attention capture (for early examples of dichotic listening, see Broadbent, 1958;Cherry, 1953; for a review see Hugdahl, 2011, for studies on selective attention to a certain part of a complex stimulus, see Mondor, & Bregman, 1994;Mondor, Zatorre, & Terrio, 1998).…”

“…Recently, intentional control of auditory attention has been investigated in other studies as well, but these previous studies focused on shifting between two simultaneously presented auditory stimuli (spoken number words) and used dichotic listening , 2015Koch et al, 2011;, 2015. Dichotic listening studies did not observe mixing costs consistently.…”

Release from masking for small spatial separations: Effects of age and hearing loss

“…Traditional models that predict SRM based on interaural differences in level (ILDs) and time (ITDs) are generally successful in predicting the intelligibility of target speech when target and maskers are spatially separated in the azimuthal plane (Zurek, 1993;Bronkhorst, 2015). Recent studies of speech-on-speech masking have concluded that SRM is a combination of better-ear listening and binaural analysis (Kidd et al, 1998;Freyman et al, 1999;Arbogast et al, 2002;Best et al, 2006;Marrone et al, 2008b).…”

Simultaneous Bilateral Cochlear Implantation for a 6-Month Child with a History of Meningitis

“…Преимущества бинаурального слуха обеспечивают-ся сложными нейрофизиологическими процессами [18]. Точная локализация в пространстве источника звука [13] и лучшая разборчивость речи при наличии шума возмож-ны благодаря трем компонентам бинаурального слуха: эффекту «тени головы», эффекту бинаурального шумопо-давления и эффекту суммации [19].…”